ANNALS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST. Philosophy Series. Number I PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

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1 ANNALS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST Philosophy Series 2014 Number I SUMAR SOMMAIRE CONTENTS PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION MANUEL SUMARES, Signifying the Mystical as Struggle: Yannaras Orthodox Refiguring of Philosophy of Language... 3 SEBASTIAN MATEIESCU, John Polkinghorne on Divine Action ETHICS AND SOCIETY CONSTANTIN STOENESCU, Nature and Legal Norm from an Environmentalist Standpoint ANA BAZAC, O, Tempora : A Methodological Model to Approach the Crisis CULTURAL HERITAGE AND HUMAN SCIENCES FLORIN PRUNĂ, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline MARŢIAN IOVAN, Vasile Goldiş s Contribution to the Philosophy of Education and the Development of Social Pedagogy SEBASTIAN ŞTEFĂNUCĂ, Some Reflections on the Universe of Ethnology and Its Related Sciences... 77

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3 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION SIGNIFYING THE MYSTICAL AS STRUGGLE: YANNARAS ORTHODOX REFIGURING OF PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE MANUEL SUMARES 1 Abstract In accordance with the early Wittgenstein, for Christos Yannaras, the mystical might show itself in experience, but which, in propositional terms, remains transcendent and ultimately non-sense. Yet, the struggle at once to signify and to relate to the ultimately a inexpressible persists as integral to human being. Indeed, it defines the specificity of his involvement in the order of Life. With Heidegger s help, Yannaras philosophy of language, factoring in the reality of Otherness and apophatic thinking, seeks to explore the dimensions of rationality in relational terms. The net effect of his creative thinking on language and rationality is, above all, suggestive in demonstrating the potential of patristic intuitions that underlie Yannaras philosophy in view of providing an alternative direction for contemporary thought. Keywords: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, apophaticism, Otherness, Orthodoxy. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein set out the conditions of what can be said in the hope of seeing the world aright. For him, the task of philosophy is to adjudicate in the use of language the boundaries between knowledge and nonsense. He clearly advances the issue hanging in the balance in the Preface to the Tractatus: his work, he says, aims at drawing a limit not so much between thoughts as such, but in regard to how thought is expressed: / / for in order to able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e., we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense. (Wittgenstein 1971, 3). As the demonstrations proceed in the work, proposition after proposition, a close reading finds some surprising turns in the argument. For one thing, the 1 Associate Professor, The Faculty of Philosophy (Braga) of the Catholic University of Portugal; coordinator of the post-graduate programme in the Philosophy of Religion; editor of the Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia; Orthodox priest.

4 4 MANUEL SUMARES nonsensical, namely, that which cannot conform to the linguistic conditions of the thinkable, constitutes the most interesting and pervasive part of the human experience. For another, the logical space, postulated as the conditio sine qua non for saying something sensible, i.e., meaningful, we find to be ultimately nonsense, unthinkable. Like the ethical, the aesthetic, and the mystical, the logical space itself remains beyond meaning and the capacity of language to signify it. And, again, like the ethical, the aesthetic, and the mystical, the logical space can only be shown to the degree that it is actually being deployed in act. Yet, it cannot be properly said. But, yet again, all meaning depends on it. Not an analytical philosopher who would pursue these questions on the terms that Wittgenstein cast them in that early work, Christos Yannaras does nevertheless reflect on the nature of language with manifest reference to notions derived from the Tractatus. Besides the persistent reference to logical spaces, he manifestly makes serious use, notably, in Postmodern Metaphysics and Relational Ontology, of famous Wittgensteinian dicta like: The limits of my language are the limits of my world (5.6) ; The sense of the world lies outside the world (6.41) ; and There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical (6.522). But he ultimately sets these themes within the context of Heidegger s recovery of the ontological question, the key concept of which at least as Yannaras explores it is the existential fact. In regard particularly to the mystical, he proposes, There also exists the so-called mystical approach to the interpretation of the logos (i.e., cause and purpose) of the existence of existent things. / / The mystical approach relies on the obviousness (the self-evidence, self-manifestation) of the logos meaning as it emerges from the experience of participation in the existential fact. / / Mystical experience does not entirely renounce its linguistic expression, but it attempts to express itself indirectly through allegories, poetic images, and metaphors. (Yannaras 2011, 6-7). In varying the perspective of the relation between the mystical and language within the parameters of existential fact, Yannaras refigures suggestively Wittgenstein s initial thesis concerning the expressible character of the mystical. Though only indirectly as far as the mystical is concerned, the two sides of the limits that Wittgenstein sought to keep apart are brought by Yannaras into communication. In the vocabulary of Heidegger that Yannaras frequently employs, we might describe the situation as exploring the possibility of introducing the more original and potentially transformative Logos into the ontic confines of linguistic analysis. Thereby, we can anticipate that the mystical approach will associate with the eventfulness of the logos capacity to cause and instil purpose, indeed to provide a sense for the world. Moreover, to those who participate in its mode of existence, it is to be celebrated in language that speaks of a relational experience surpassing mere intellectual conceptualisation.

5 SIGNIFYING THE MYSTICAL AS STRUGGLE: YANNARAS ORTHODOX REFIGURING OF PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 5 In regard to the kind of language able to bring this experience and this relation to the fore of human rationality, the theology of the Church provides in its liturgical practices ontological paths to the inexpressible that it knows, nevertheless, as love, or better, as having an erotic love for her. In sum, the language of the mystical will be the language of desire, i.e., the divine Logos, God, translated into Lacanian psychoanalysis as the Other and space within which the rationality of desiring human subjects is formed. Yannaras will weave into Wittgensteinian linguistic questions the Heideggerian interest in existential fact; in turn, Yannaras will see this as intrinsically relational, namely, the condition for rationality driven by desire. But in doing so, Yannaras is we believe effectively situating a thematic that largely dominates Western philosophy within the distinctively Orthodox conviction that we engage the uncreated and divine essence only through the created, itself permeated with uncreated energies. As witnessed by the Church and delivered in Tradition, the experience is participatory and the human reality that emerges is a confederated one, rooted in divine theophanies and gathered together in the theandric Christ. Notwithstanding the decidedly, and potentially polemical mystical tone of the proposal, Yannaras Orthodox refiguring of philosophy of language does constitute a challenge to the Western thinking about the thematic, which as Wittgenstein defined it constitutes a primary form of human life and thereby influences all else. It is precisely its challenge and possible shortcomings that we should like to explore in the following and perhaps envisage as a path of inquiry worth furthering. In reconstructing Yannaras thoughts on the mystical and the struggle to signify it, we believe that we are addressing the core thesis of his theological philosophy and hope to give a fair account of its import for theistic metaphysics in our time. It will require to begin with establishing apophaticism as the new common ground in contemporary philosophy in order to prepare for a reworking of the notion of the logical space and, finally, to see the signifying of the mystical as related to the birthing and re-birthing of the human subject. Apophatic Thinking and Linguistic Potential: Unorthodox Limitations and Orthodox Possibilities The idea of a consequential breakdown of philosophical foundationalism, exemplified successively by medieval realism and modern rationalism has many adherents. But to read its history in relation to a reappearance of apophaticism, as Yannaras does, is not usual and, of itself, sets the problem against the more distant background of the patristic insistence about the unknowability of God, namely the issue of divine essence and energies. For him, the apophatic refers generically to an epistemic gap between experience and the attempt to know it, i.e., the inability to

6 6 MANUEL SUMARES translate adequately into conceptual terms what one actually knows through participatory belonging to what is effectively experienced (Yannaras 2011, 56). In Postmodern Metaphysics, Yannaras creates distinct categories that very much reveal how he conceives a fundamental metaphysical option that forms around the theme of apophaticism, Succinctely put, apophaticism comes to us in one of two ways: either it is unorthodox or it is orthodox. He calls the first intellectualist-methodological, moreover a category that would fit Wittgenstein s Tractatus especially well. The world is intellectualist-methodologically contemplated; it is one implicitly governed by chance and is, on its own, inherently senseless. Whatever sense is advanced about it is largely self-constructed, i.e., through the creation of epistemological models of interpretation. Each model deploys its own regulated process in articulating the structure of the real but none is definitive. That is, though all cogently supported by the axioms governing the methods, they remain, nevertheless, incompatible between themselves. For the most part, the proponents of intellectualist-methodology are happy to allow for the relativity of their theory-bound proposals. Voicing the basic stance of the intellectualist-methodologist, Yannaras formulates it this way: Without sacrificing methodological consistency, I do not make an absolute of it, nor in consequence do I tie it to a single methodological constant. (Yannaras 2004, 85). We find ourselves in the realm of heuristic models and metaphors; they deal with the onticity of the physical world that remains underdetermined by the attempts of human reason to express it. Therein consists its apophatic character, one that has become self-conscious in the example of post-newtonian physics in which indeterminacy and un-definability mark the sphere of the signified. The work of signifying must resort to paradoxical and less precise expressions like wave-particle, the function of which resembles, revealingly for Yannaras, theological terms such as theanthropos and mêtroparthenos. But the decisive point is that the quest for univocal scientific language yields to paradox and poetic images; they thus accentuate at the same time the greater freedom of the observer in relating to the evidence in a more personal way. Even contemporary science, he argues, does not close its mind to the poetic expressiveness of the world that it intends to explain. A step further, namely from the ontic to the ontological, would make the world appear, in its otherness, not only as a field to explore but also relational, even invitatory. The significance of personal experience may be discerned, because it does not refer to specific referents, but to the dynamics of the relation with the referents, with the inexpressible personal otherness of the referents. The new language of post-newtonian science seems to bring us nearer to the significance of the experience of the modally infinite, nearer to the language of art and love. (Yannaras 2004, 154).

7 SIGNIFYING THE MYSTICAL AS STRUGGLE: YANNARAS ORTHODOX REFIGURING OF PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 7 A possible path for postmodern metaphysics to follow, the orthodox insistence on the relational and the participatory comes into view. This will carry with it the characterisation of significative-experiential, that Yannaras proposes in a relational ontology focused on the dynamics of the existential fact. Here, the ontic plane, occupied by the descriptive natural sciences, is transcended, situating us now in a domain more akin to that cultivated by lovers and artists, i.e., that of a freedom consisting in experiential probing, or soundings, a struggle to signifying that which cannot be rendered entirely objective, but is, nonetheless, known. Implicitly honouring the orthodox essence/energies distinction, the significative-experiential approach to language values human desiring for transformative self-transcendence. Operating above the ontic, the logical space in which the signifying will take place implies an un-circumscribable otherness, constituting the true measure of personal freedom. Within the framework of Postmodern Metaphysics, the fate of apophaticism is seen then as emerging in modern and postmodern thought but also radically disengaged from the orthodox wisdom from which it actually derives. In a much earlier work, inspired by a Heideggerian destruction of modernity s obsessive fixation on efficiency and control and the desire for a renewed opening to ontological experiencing of the pre-conceptual, we are given a fuller account of what is at issue. Like Heidegger, Yannaras would underscore the virtual erasing of an original experience of being such as found in the pre-socratics and the concomitant rise of onto-theology underlying the development of the Western mind. However, far more decisive and far more tragic for Western society is the deliberate marginalisation of the philosophical potential contained in the Christian revolution as experienced powerfully by the Apostolic Church, but liturgically repeated (in the Kierkegaardian sense) and thought through by the Church Fathers of all times. Indeed, the relational ontology, as Yannaras conceives it, finds a visible manifestation in the Christian ecclesia, a privileged expression of an ontology constituted by relations and by personhood. Apophaticism is seen rightly when situated into that sphere of reality opened to view by the experience of the Church, modelled as she is by the Triadic God; it is seen wrongly, or insufficiently, when not. However, in Yannaras work, the theme harkens back to an earlier book, On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite, published originally in 1976, but might be still read profitably alongside the more recent publications by the authors of Radical Orthodoxy and those by David Bentley Hart. The meaning that Heidegger attributes to the death of God theme as a consequence of the long process of Western metaphysics and the forgetting of the ontological question perhaps underestimates, in our view, the earnestness (and perverseness) of Nietzsche s counter-gospel for a new humanity. But it is the Heideggerian reading that Yannaras takes to reinforce his own critique of Western Christianity and, indeed, Western civilisation itself. In this regard, he

8 8 MANUEL SUMARES sees Nietzsche as a prophet of the inadequacy of how the Christian God is conceived in a theology, which, in accentuating rational conceptualisation, has left us without a God who effectively saves us from death and corruption. The historical development of both natural theology and apophaticism in the West culminates in the proclamation of the death of God. (Yannaras 2005, 45-46). In other words, its apophaticism is unorthodox. No wonder God is absent, argues Yannaras, and no wonder nihilism has become the real cultural situation of the West. Responsibility for the death of God of the Western-European metaphysical tradition lies nowhere else than with Western Christendom itself. (2005, 43). Nietzsche s apophatic statement translates then in the destruction of a metaphysical idol, but not the God revealed in Christ. Once again, the underlying rule is that apophaticism refuses to accept that linguistic semantics can ever satisfy whatever it endeavours to know in cognitive acts of representing a given reality, for between the signifiers and the experiential knowledge lies an unbridgeable gulf. It refuses to exhaust the content of knowledge in its formulation, i.e., it refuses to exhaust the reality of the things signified in the logic of the signifiers (Yannaras 2004, 84). Nevertheless, the intrinsically frustrated struggle to bring signifiers into a complete correspondence with what is signified actually obscures but not eliminates an ultimately more promising connection between the two poles: semantic suggestiveness in regard to the reality that it expresses is better understood as the dynamic indeterminacy of relationships that underlies the workings of human reason before that which it endeavours to know. In sum, the primary mode of connecting knower and known is not conceptual but relational, i.e., existential, participative, and personal. What we call truth is only achieved through the struggle to attain relations concomitantly with a greater degree of rationality (Yannaras 2011, 9). The underscoring of the fundamental status of the relational and the participative as expressed in the notion of significative-experential enables Yannaras thus to recognise in the more ancient, and yet richer, version of apophaticism in Dionysius the Areopagite than the one that Heidegger advanced. (Yannaras 2005). The unknowability of God does not for the Areopagite finally translate into His absence, for God s erotic love for mankind seeks to engage his human creation and deify it; Heidegger s ontology, albeit admirable in its appreciation of the onto-theological trap into which the West has fallen, remains uncommitted and non-participatory in relation to an unknowable and, for all practical purposes, an absent God. As it is practiced in the West and as can be noted in both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the use of apophaticism concerns itself with restraining the scope of rational knowledge, based merely on conceptual capacity. It remains forgetful of knowledge as involving fundamentally the experienced immediacy of relatedness with that to which the rational knower is engaged.

9 SIGNIFYING THE MYSTICAL AS STRUGGLE: YANNARAS ORTHODOX REFIGURING OF PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 9 The contribution that Yannaras makes in this regard is to underscore that the existential fact of the human subject lies in his acute sense of self-conscious otherness. The experience of this fact invites him to transcend ontic relationships and to enter into the ontological opening constituted by the dynamics of personhood. Under the sign of ontological difference, Yannaras rethinks the kind of analogical thinking applicable to a viable metaphysics as sustained by the factor of otherness. i.e., by analogical relationality, the apophatic quality that escapes ontic description, immersed as it is in the constitution of correlated otherness of the Triadic God. It is an apophaticism of divine being, insisting upon essential otherness that underlies any analogical correlation of the uncreated God with created beings. (Yannaras 2005, 28). The experienced immediacy of relatedness with the other constitutes the only authentic foundation at once for a full theory of knowledge and philosophy of language, both ultimately open-ended and implying a sense-producing struggle. The Qualitative Leap of Relational Rationality and the Postulate of the Un-Circumscribable Logical Space As we have mentioned, Yannaras follows Wittgenstein in thinking that the sense of the world lay outside the world. However, in his own rendering of it, Yannaras would conceive the onticity of the natural world as ontologically located within the dynamics of relationality and eros, i.e., that which lays outside the world. On the basis of what we have seen up until now, we can summarise the position thusly: a. ontically, the laws of nature, including those that govern the physicalbiological dimension of human nature, cannot be said to have qualities unto themselves; b. whatever meaning they have depends on the bearer of the logos of nature, the human subject; c. the distinctive ontological capacity of human being entails the laborious articulation of the relationality that constitute the world as such and his own being. In the world, but not of it, the human existent is beckoned to decide the sense of his life but, in so doing, he decides that of the world as well. He may decide to look principally to his biogenetic relation to the created world and be limited by its onticity and its mortality. These would constitute the parameters within which he cultivates his own sense of self. Or, alternatively, he may decide to delve with more consequence into the space of the Other, motivated by desire to realise his relational existence and achieve a mode of likeness to the uncreated. Human persons are, thereby, bearers of hypostatic energy that signify nature with their own logos, bound analogically that of God s.

10 10 MANUEL SUMARES In regard to this, very reminiscent of Kierkegaard (but probably via Heidegger), Yannaras underscores the leap involved in the yearning for freedom from the impersonal natural order. The vocation to participate more fully in the interpersonal demonstrates his will-for-freedom and brings to light the complicity of language and desire. /There is/ a leap from urge to desire, from desire to language, from language to the manyfaceted nature (the infinity of parts ) of epistemic potentiality, from a predetermined capacity to perform certain skills to a creative otherness; a leap, finally, from the undifferentiated individual of a natural uniform species to the subject of self-conscious, active (not merely morphic otherness) that is to say, a leap to the subject of freedom from what is predetermined by nature. (Yannaras 2011, 33). Within the orthodox schematics of divine essence/ uncreated energies/ created energies that can be found here, we can formulate in general terms what Yannaras has in mind. For him, the created energies operative in the human mode of existence possess the potential for the realisation of freedom that transcends the natural preconditions rooted in the biological. Uncreated grace will constitute the invitatory instances that will seal the entrance into communion of reciprocating free wills. Beginning again with the created energies, we see that the causal relations at work within the biological can be duly accounted for by scientific description as necessarily present in the higher expressions of human communication. Yet it is precisely the nature of seeking engagement with the other that produces, within the organism, a constant self-organisation reflecting an increasing consciousness that cannot be reduced to scientific explanation. Crucial for the emergence of human communication is the conversion of acoustic images into the symbolic of socially sharable linguistic signifiers tacitly desiring to signify and relate to the Other. By the word relation we identify the fact that only in humankind does appetitive referentiality encounter in the place of its reference (the space of the Other) a mark of the power to respond to the desire. (Yannaras 2011, 48). The qualitative leap is thus spawned in the trajectory of intentionality provoked by the otherness implied in human desiring. It represents the possibility of making the created energies into receptors of those that are uncreated. In this case, the energies of the Other, like the divine Logos, act responsively and are received in the linguistic acts and the subsequent intellection. Rationality, the power to realise relation, is grounded in the primordial desire for its Logos, the fundamental reference for its self-transcending ascent beyond the non-rational desires. These can only exhaust themselves in the onticity of their biological, dimension, inflected by chance and, in and of itself, senseless. For the world to have meaning, it requires the postulation of a logical space that is unbounded and yet intentional in its own right. Such a logical space

11 SIGNIFYING THE MYSTICAL AS STRUGGLE: YANNARAS ORTHODOX REFIGURING OF PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 11 constitutes furthermore the condition for making philosophical and scientific investigations of the world possible. Thanks to intentionality, the whole of the logical space of the world becomes a meaningful question, a question extended into all possible situations of things. For this reason the logical space of intentionality is indefinable. Uncircumscribed, the logical space of intentionality establishes and perpetually maintains philosophy and science. As zero logical space, chance destroys philosophy and makes science nonsensical. (Yannaras 2004, 70). Albeit indefinable and un-circumscribed, the indispensable logical space marked by intentionality already implies a relational ontology transcending the natural order, whilst establishing a sphere of freedom that explores the potential for personal existence. Herein lies the substance of the struggle to signify and to become more fully rational: exploring the resources of its intrinsic freedom that does not confine itself to the finite and merely natural, it can activate dimensions exceeding the natural plane and make viable the postulating of the modally infinite. The experience of the modally infinite / / is confirmed fundamentally not in the relationship of humanity with the world, but in its freedom from this relationship. That is, in the ability of humanity to create its own world not subject to the necessities of nature, to form relationships referring not to facts of nature but to its own existential otherness to create art, culture, history. (Yannaras 2004, 146). The more personal the relationship, the more supra-natural and properly personal the network of causality within which subjectivities engage with one another, the more the experience of the modally infinite becomes identified with logical space that determines the signifier, anthropos, with that created being generated in the space of the Other i.e., God. The uncreated causal principle of the created inspires love and erotic yearning precisely because the signifier God bears this very meaning, for, in conformity with the experience of the Church, God is love and erotic yearning. She further sees Him as the One whose freedom from necessity is such that He may choose to exist in the mode of human nature without ceasing to be God. In the face of such a revelation, the Church would eventually employ hypostatic signifiers Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to express the inexpressible. She seeks to relate the ultimate causal principle in God (the Father) s unlimited freedom to beget life-giving Logos, whose Spirit proceeds from the Father and is sent to manifest divine being in that which is not-god. The Church thus draws upon language of created rational beings but dramatically inflected by Christ s witnessing to the uncreated Father/God to Whom He is related as Son.

12 12 MANUEL SUMARES The Church adhered consistently to the apophatic character of the linguistic formulations of its experience, refusing to exhaust the truth in its formulations or to identify the knowledge of things signified merely with the understanding of the signifiers. (Yannaras 2011, 78-79). The signifiers employed to express this set of relations are assumed by the Church s own participation in the reality of the Triadic God. In the context of this relational ontology, the words drawn from ordinary life are given a capacity to signify the meta-physical and to be approached only analogically and relatively, but actually approached experientially through participation. That is, the experience of the relation is real. In lieu of propositions structured around formal inferences, poetic imagery and languages of art constitute more apt means of symbolic expression in this regard. We have already acknowledged with Yannaras the epistemic gap between our understanding of the signifiers and what may be experienced and known metaphysically. The signifiers are densely determined by the criteria and principles of specific epistemological and cultural paradigms. Metaphysical language is thus necessarily relative to those paradigms and the propensity to justify them. However, the metaphysical experience in relation to the Other as such is nevertheless highly personal and its communicability will call upon a relational language that wishes to express the sureness of the erotic relation, its confirmation that it is true and a foundational belief for the meaning of the rest. Criteria concerning the experience will evoke the desire to give oneself to the Other, overcoming the impulse for individual self-preservation and domination. Rather a self-offering is aspired to with the clear sense that freedom is achieved and personal integrity is assured in the experience. Mystical knowledge of God is thus a matter of engaging with God s kenotic nature and prolonging it in acts. The epistemological confirmation resides then precisely in its reciprocity, assuring that the otherness of the Other may be approached as such and making communion based on mutual self-giving possible. A culture informed by this experience will have a language (like that of the liturgical language of the Church) capable to incite in its poetry and its art the erotic impulse to relate to the divine energies that effectively create a new circumstance for those who participate in it. The anagogic aspirations inhering in human rationality sustains in faith and hope the experience of the modally infinite and the private absolute, suggesting a yearning to seek a relational mode of existence that might overcome death and participate in the uncreated. The issue for Yannaras seems to hang on following through on the rationality that is at once relational and ontological, i.e., in the reception and cultivation of those energies originating from the uncreated and transforming the mode of existence into that related to un-circumscribed divine freedom. The death of the created human entity, an entity capable of the reciprocity of relation, could rationally be taken as a positive step toward some kind of assimilation (mutatis mutandis) to the mode of the freedom of the uncreated

13 SIGNIFYING THE MYSTICAL AS STRUGGLE: YANNARAS ORTHODOX REFIGURING OF PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 13 (Yannaras 2011, 104). The ecclesial experience gives witness to death as strictly defined as a rejection of a relation with God and fear of death being an irrational impulse to self-preservation. The language of the New Testament writings defines the Church s transforming experience but cannot substitute it. They proclaim in a language understood by all that salvation from death and decay has come in the Person of Jesus the Christ, the language itself cannot be made to replace the experience, always already in excess of linguistic limits. However, the struggle to signify the mystical assumes the relational into the erotic that underscores the distinctiveness of Christian aesthetics of beauty and God as radically invitatory. /... / for the experience of physical beauty to function referentially, to refer to the personal immediacy of God the Creator, to be read as an erotic summons from God the Lover and Bridesgroom of humankind, the decisive factor cannot be some rational proof of the significance of beauty, nor the perceptive persuasion of emotional excitement. (Yannaras 2011, 72). The experience of such beauty associated with the kenotic God is a transcending one, actively engaging in unbounded desire, revealing a personal otherness that is unique and responsive to human desiring by offering it a new life. The measure of the divine beauty that awakens life is yet another criterion of a non-illusory experience of God. The triadic God of the Christian experience becomes the implicit measure of existential authenticity. Explicated from an ontological perspective, the measure discerns the rapport between the uncreated and the created: the qualitative dimension of freedom from the limitations of time, space, and movement standing against the predeterminations and limitations that defines atomic onticity and constitutes, in comparison, a sense of fall, that is not meant to have the last word. In Conclusion Yannaras Orthodox refiguring of the philosophy of language as originally formatted by Wittgenstein and, in a different key, by Heidegger operates on the basis of a retrieval of three distinct, albeit complicit, conceptual spheres that are central to patristic thinking and that converge on the idea of signifying the mystical. Briefly summarised, apophaticism points to the priority of participation in the uncreated energies of an unknowable God; the divine, uncreated energies are experienced, but the divine essence from which they come is beyond every conceivable concept. Nevertheless, the humility derived from apophatic disciplining of thought and the priority given to relatedness creates for human reason a logical space for its signifiers now understood as uncircumscribable divine logos, expressed and rendered meaningful in the language and worship of the Church that celebrates God s love for humankind

14 14 MANUEL SUMARES and the invitation for an appropriately loving response in return. Within the purview of apophaticism, the divine logos, and the experience of the Church the range of verifiable meaning furthers considerably what both Wittgenstein and Heidegger envisaged as possible for language. Yet, if the specificity of the Christian experience is to be highlighted in regard to language, it remains to be asked whether Wittgenstein and Heidegger lead in the right, i.e., Orthodox, direction. This would be particularly the case with Heidegger, but Wittgenstein would not be exempt from following the more pagan approach to philosophy by prioritizing the experience of the world and yet depriving the world of its own redemption in the divine economy of grace. To put the matter differently and following Michel Henry in his expression, with the Christian Revolution the philosophical question does not become one about the forgetfulness of being, i.e., the ontological difference, but the forgetfulness of our divine affiliation sons in the Son? And does not this render the real ontological interrogation less about the revelation of being, less about ecstatic ontological leap into a communion of persons, leaving the ontic order behind, and more about receiving a gift from a self-donating God who is Absolute Life? If we must speak of the ecstatic, would it not be better conceived within the economy of divine self-donation? And would not the patristic mind be more in tune with the recognition of Life as more urgent ontologically speaking and privileged than that of worldly experience? or better, to see the latter in the perspective of the former, the fullness of the implications of the Incarnate Word and its hypostatic glorifying of matter? 2 Yannaras deployment of apophaticism, his reworking of logical space, and his courageous affirmation of the singular ontological status of the Church are certainly helpful in putting important postulates of modern and postmodern philosophy in a new and yet ancient perspective and provide these with renewed possibilities. This is already a considerable achievement. But, particularly given his uncompromising critique of Western options in philosophy and the life of the Church, is he radical enough on this score? Has he bought too much into the Wittgensteinian and Heideggerian format of philosophy of language and not enough into the Word that precedes human words about the world and, in fact, creates it whilst it speaks? If this comes into view in liturgy, and most notably in the Eucharist, ought we not to allow that these things too give rise to thought, 2 Curiously, several essays dedicated to the man-as-priest-of -creation theme and Byzantine liturgical art, published in Freedom of Morality, do accentuate the sense of cosmic liturgy and the redemptive transfiguration of matter. But the theme is practically lost in the more recent Postmodern Metaphysics and Relational Ontotology that we have been following in this essay. Nevertheless, the following passage from an additional note to his Ethos of Liturgical Art is noteworthy for underscoring the art of introducing created matter into divine life: /Such forms of art embody/ man s struggle for the truth of matter and the world, a struggle and an ascetic effort to bring about the communal event of personal freedom and distinctiveness. (Yannaras 1984, 264).

15 SIGNIFYING THE MYSTICAL AS STRUGGLE: YANNARAS ORTHODOX REFIGURING OF PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE 15 and even philosophical thought, about the nature of relationality and the power of language, originating in the un-circumscribed, to realize truth and beauty and to delight? BIBLIOGRAPHY Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1971). Tractatus Lógico-Philosophicus. Translation by Pears and McGuinneess. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Yannaras, Christos (1984). The Freedom of Morality. Crestwood: St. Vladimir s Press. (2004). Postmodern Metaphysics. Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press. (2005). On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite. London: T&T Clark. (2011). Relational Ontology. Translation: Norman Russell. Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox College.

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17 JOHN POLKINGHORNE ON DIVINE ACTION SEBASTIAN MATEIESCU 1 Abstract This essay investigates John Polkinghorne s concept of divine action. I argue that one of Polkinghorne s key innovations was to introduce the paradigm of information-input causation into the theory of divine action. However, despite this achievement, I show that Polkinghorne s approach is trapped in an insuperable dilemma: it either can be reduced to classical noninformational causal accounts of divine action or turns God into a cause among others. Keywords: John Polkinghorne, divine action, information-input causation, chaos, complex dynamical systems, God as a cause among others. 1. Introduction In this essay, I analyze Polkinghorne s view on divine action. This theme has a long history in the theological and philosophical thinking and has puzzled both past and present writers. The topic of divine action occupied the minds of most Christian thinkers, who, starting with the Early Christian period 2 up until Thomas Aquinas 3 and Gregory Palamas 4 provided various solutions to this problem. Contemporary approaches of this issue, like that by Polkinghorne, which strongly take into account modern advances of science when dealing with divine action, encountered wider audience with the development of Divine Action Project, sponsored by the Vatican Observatory and the Centre for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley. 5 The basic hypothesis this project started from was that causal gaps in nature seem to be necessary in order to accommodate the concept of divine action to restrictions imposed by modern CELFIS, University of Bucharest. See for details, J. Rebecca Lymann (1993). Christology and Cosmology: Models of Divine Activity in Origen, Eusebius, and Athanasius. Oxford: Clarendon Press. See for details, M. Dodds (2012). Unlocking Divine Action: Contemporary Science and Thomas Aquinas. The Catholic University of America Press. See for details, T. Tollefsen (2012). Activity and Participation in Late Antique and Early Christian Thought. Oxford University Press. See for details, the following entry: (last accessed at ).

18 18 SEBASTIAN MATEIESCU science. A second hypothesis was that divine action should be proved noninterventionist for otherwise it would be contradictory to conceiving of God as perfectly designing the world and its laws from the beginning and afterwards wishing to suspend them. This demand for non-interventionist, objective, divine action was shared by Polkinghorne together with many others, though his approach could be singularized as an endeavor to look for causal gaps within complex dynamical systems and information theory instead of searching for traditional energy based or matter-type models for divine causality. 6 The innovative way in which Polkinghorne reframed the approach to the issue of divine action has been widely acknowledged by nowadays scholarship and the aim of this paper is to give a conceptual analysis of this theory. 7 Despite its achievements, I hold that this theory could be faced with a serious dilemma: it either can be reduced to classical non-informational causal accounts of divine action or turns God into a cause among others. Yet, as it will come up from the subsequent arguments, Polkinghorne designed his theory to specially avoid these conclusions. My strategy is to start from some of Polkinghorne s general reflections on God (section 2). Following, I will question the natural processes in which God may act according to Polkinghorne (chapter 3). In chapter four I discuss the mechanism of this action and draw on some of its misinterpretations. Finally, Polkinghorne s theory of divine action is faced with the dilemma mentioned above (section 5). 2. Personal God On a classical reading, the world could be considered as a result of God s will. Thus, God could be seen as acting upon it whenever he wants and without being constrained by anything. According to this picture, God could change or break the laws of nature because they all depend on his absolute will. Once he is endowed with an absolute power, nothing could resist his will, even when he 6 7 Despite taking into account the advances brought in by quantum mechanics and other recent theories in science, it seems that authors like A. Peacocke, I. Barbour, J. Russell and others linked to the Divine Action Project did not emphasized the need to abandon the classical view of matter-energy type of causation as Polkinghorne did. For a short but interesting comparison between Polkinghorne s contribution to the theory of divine action and A. Peacocke and I. Barbour, see Christopher C. Knight (2012). John Polkinghorne, in J.B. Stump & A.G. Padgget, The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity. Wiley-Blackwell. pp For a biographical sketch and recent survey of the work by John Polkinghorne and its relevance for the dialogue between science and religion, see Christopher C. Knight 2012, Knight starts his essay by portraying Polkinghorne as being one of the most significant figures in the dialogue between science and theology in the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first

19 JOHN POLKINGHORNE ON DIVINE ACTION 19 may want things which seem irrational to us. 8 For Polkinghorne, this (classical) conception of God is not one that commends itself to Christian theology. 9 God as a supernatural agent appears to him as an old fashioned view. Most importantly, he thinks it inadequately represents God as a ruler of the universe, who acts intermittently or even capriciously. This probably fits better than anything else with the traditional position designating the universe by using the clock metaphor, that is, the universe behaves like a mechanism which needs restarted at a certain period of time. 10 Nevertheless, the idea of the universe as a mechanism which sometimes needs an impulse from God is repugnant to Polkinghorne. His reason for this is that this view actually limits God s activity only to the preservation of the world: The outdated mechanical universe of pretwentieth century physical science would not have been the fitting creation of the Christian God, though it could certainly be said to exhibit his economy and acquiescence (Polkinghorne 1989, 9). As we will further see, Polkinghorne emphasizes that the world is actually much more complex than the clock metaphor suggests and this allows him to explore a different approach to divine action. It seems his theory was also motivated by his commitment to a theistic picture about God, that is a view which supports the hypothesis that God must enter in a relationship with humans and his creation. Being a God who bestows his love to human persons, he must be able to act and react continuously and not only for adjusting the clock of the world. The Christian God is conceived in this context as one we cooperate with by asking and praying. Of course, a detailed explanation of this interaction is difficult to provide though Polkinghorne considers there is room for both our freedom and for God s will to meet in a personal interaction (1989, 70). Polkinghorne thinks God s special interaction with the world must be accepted by all who contemplate on divine action, otherwise our prayers and our hopes would be in vain. 11 For a Christian believer, this is not an absurdity since for such a person God is a living being, open to the beings he has created: He is not just the abstract God of natural theology but he is also the living God He is the one who is worshipped by the elders in the Book of Revelation (1989, 10). In this context, Polkinghorne also emphasizes how unsuitable the concept of demiurge is in general, because it actually suggests only the idea of God as the cause of the universe. Albeit this picture gives God a superior power and intelligence, it appears to Polkinghorne as an awkward attempt to portray God as a cause among others, that is, the work For a description of the issue of the omnipotence of God in this context, see A. Funkenstein (1986). Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. Princeton University Press. ch. 3: Divine Omnipotence and the Laws of Nature. J. Polkinghorne Science and Providence, SPCK, 1989, p. 6. From now on I will refer to this book by the abbreviation: Polkinghorne (1989) and I will follow below similar abbreviations for all the references to Polkinghorne s works. See, for details, E. Dolnick (2011). The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World. Harper Collins. See ch. 9.

20 20 SEBASTIAN MATEIESCU of God would be comparable with any work performed by a cause in the world which continuously sustains its effect (Polkinghorne 1988, 55). For example, think of the force of gravity that permanently maintains the planets in a particular position in the universe. For Polkinghorne and for most Christians, God must perform special works different in their character than those performed by common causes for this is the way in which he makes himself known to humans. Thus, for the Anglican theologian God could not be confused with other causes, he is the God of Jews and Christians, which uniquely shares in both a transcendent and an immanent status. God is behind anything conceivable by men, being somehow totally incomprehensible, though he revels himself and enters a kind of dialogue with every person (Polkinghorne 1989, 17). Undoubtedly, prayer is here taken as one of the most straightforward means through which this meeting can be reached. According to Polkinghorne, between human s wishes and God s will there has to be a point of intersection and prayer seems to be the perfect place for this crossing because due to prayer we can align to God s will (1989, 70). Polkinghorne emphasizes that in the act of praying we somehow engage in accomplishing God s will but also open ourselves for finding a possible answer to our wishes because he is the God of love (Polkinghorne 1988, 54) and the God who suffers when his people suffer (Polkinghorne 1989, 19). Undoubtedly, this is a complex process but what Polkinghorne suggests is that it is impossible to think about this in terms other than co-operation. In the act of praying both men and God act and react and so both contribute to this meeting (Polkinghorne 1989, 70-71). As a result, for Polkinghorne, the Christian God interacts with humans and he is not acting only for sustaining the universe. He is a theistic God, open to listening to our wishes and acting in response to them. We need now investigating what are the processes in nature identified by Polkinghorne which may suggest the possibility of such a special divine providence, according to which God interferes with his creation and not only acts through a general divine providence for just preserving it in existence. As for Polkinghorne and all other contributors to the theory of divine action, the proviso should always be the following: special divine action should not run God into inconsistency or irrationality. In other words, it has to be in line with the general divine providence through which God made the world and through which he continuously maintains it for it can be easily inferred from the Christian representation of God that he must be consistent with all his actions. 3. Complex Dynamical Systems Polkinghorne states that the perfect place where we could find traces of God s action in nature is the complex dynamical process. He introduces the idea by taking the analogy between us and our bodies, respectively God and the material world. In this approach, humans are seen as mind/matter amphibians,

21 JOHN POLKINGHORNE ON DIVINE ACTION 21 where the mental component can be considered as emerging at an indefinitely flexible degree of organization of the matter (Polkinghorne 1989, 26). Within this complementary couple, the mind can be taken as somehow interacting or acting upon the body. Polkinghorne thinks the material processes of the body show a high flexibility and this could fit for the conditions defining such an interaction (1989, 26). In analogy with this, Polkinghorne suggests we might contemplate the idea that the flexibility within the matter of the universe might allow for the divine action upon it. However, he also emphasizes the limits of the analogy: God does not act as the mind does because He is not an amphibian but is always free from matter (1989, 27). The British theologian also explores the possibility of finding the cause of the flexibility of matter in the well-known quantum phenomena. These matters are purported to be good candidates in fulfilling the task of openness marked by the flexibility of matter. 12 At least, at first sight, this is what their random character might suggest to us. 13 One may think it is in their purported uncaused behavior where we could find the soil fitting to God s action. Yet, Polkinghorne casts serious doubts on the validity of this proposal. He first recalls us that quantum uncertainties, if interpreted ontologically, are valid only for individual quantum events. But at the level described by Newtonian mechanics or at common sense level, they bear low relevance since there everything is described classically. 14 Moreover, the British physicist emphasizes that quantum processes imply an indeterminist description only when measurements occur. The corollary of this for the interpretation of divine action through quantum gaps is that this approach would licenses to limiting God s action only to cases of measurements, a conclusion that would not be acceptable at a theological level (Polkinghorne 1989, 24). It turns out that, for Polkinghorne, the best place where we can find the flexibility in nature that might allow for God s action should be rather occupied by the domain of complex dynamical systems. 15 And it seems to me the most important part of Polkinghorne s originality to the One of the first advocates of the idea of using quantum gaps as the medium for God s action, a point against which Polkinghorne provided several arguments across time, is Robert Russell; see, for details, Robert Russell et all. (eds.) (1988). Physics, Philosophy and Theology, Vatican Observatory, 1988 and T. Peters & N. Hallanger (eds.) (2000). God s Action in Nature s World. Essays in Honour of Robert John Russell, Ashgate. On randomness as a characteristic of quantum mechanics, see Hilgevoord, Jan and Uffink, Jos, The Uncertainty Principle, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = entries/qt-uncertainty/ (accessed at ). See for details, Polkinghorne One of the first systematic accounts of the issue of chaos, complex dynamical systems and divine action has been given in R.J. Russell, N. Murphy and A.R. Peacocke (eds.), Chaos and Complexity. Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, Vatican Observatory Publications, Vatican City State and the Centre for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley, California.